Keith Thompson

Keith Thompson

Keith Thompson, an independent author, journalist, blogger and dad who lives in northern California, writes, “I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women’s right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention…A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan’s use of the word “evil” had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

“When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find “evil” too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.”

Thompson’s website contains a number of interesting articles including this interview with mandolin wizard David Grisman.

Thompson can be reached at .

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